I despise you. You are all so pathetic, and it pains me to think down to the level of common humans. Three or four days, by my estimate, was the time it would take them to follow what trails I could not avoid and find the cottage. By that time, of course, I was long gone. I did not leave them any traps or explosives. That is childish movie stuff, and it takes time and resources that are better spent elsewhere.

I had left them something else. The bio-weapon samples that I took from the lab. Re-sealed and stuffed back into the original bag that I had used to smuggle them out. I left everything else as if I had left in a hurry. A couple of forged documents of the kind an amateur can fake - car documents, train tickets, hotel reservations. A pile of other crap to sift through - pieces of old bills, the part with the date torn off, an old motorbike oil can, flyers of a boat rental company. If I had missed any traces they could use to follow me, it was buried beneath a pile of fake stuff they had to sift through first.

Meanwhile, I was on my way to my mail-order-business. Delivery time.

Back in the days, morons with six-digit salaries and military ranks had given thoughts to the potential delivery systems for biological weapons. Bombs, grenades, infected corpses thrown out of low-flying planes, the works.

During my years in the research lab, it became quite clear to me that they had been too stuck in the framework of conventional warfare. Biological weapons only make sense in one capacity: As a first strike weapon. And for that, your best delivery system is UPS and DHL.

I had set up a fake startup company and lured in some collaborators with science talk and science papers that were good enough to fool anyone not a leading expert in the field. Easy to do when you are one of the best in a related field.

You see, in the time of hyper-capitalism, precarious freelancing and ADD-media, there was a trend to optimise the self towards efficiency in daily routines. Save five minutes in the shower to help the environment and get more time for work. Ride the bike to work to protect the rain forest and merge commute and workout into one so you don’t waste gym time in the evening. And then there are ready-to-eat meals. Since the invention of the microwave oven, a constant presence in the life of sub- and urban singles and families. But after an initial hype the pre-processed food got a bad reputation, not always deserved. Plus you still need to heat it and eat it and that’s just too much work in a busy day.

So the movement to reduce food to a purely mechanical intake of calories and essential chemical compounds appeared. Of course with a sticker of a „healthy living“ attitude that was necessary to sell anything in that time. If you mix these berries and those fruits and that grain and all grind it up into a fine powder, you can dehydrate it for easy transport and preservation, and then mix it with water, giving you a porridge-like substance that contains everything an adult needs for an entire day.

A lot of those products appeared, and many of them were crowdfunded, made by startup companies that went out of business quickly after people discovered that actually taste and texture does matter when it comes to food, especially if you want to eat it every day.

Idiots, the lot of them, but useful idiots. I made up my own recipe, my own startup company. Took in a few collaborators to play the CEO and marketing roles while I pretended to be the distant genius inventor who had money but no social skills and needed a team to get his invention into the market. My approach was competitive pricing, especially for early supporters, and promises on the edge of believability. I think half of our crowdfunders were merely curious if we could deliver what we promised and for 20 bucks they were ready to laugh about themselves if it turned out hogwash.

This way, by the time I had multiplied my bio-weapon samples, I also had thousands of people all around the world who would willingly put something I sent them by mail into their bodies. You see, A-279 is a slow-acting agent. It was designed for spot injections into the enemy country, and would spread among the population for around two to three weeks before symptoms appeared in its victims. They would linger for another few weeks, bloating up, in constant agony. The last-stage symptoms were both ugly and even more painful. As a weapon, A-279 was designed to destroy the morale of the enemy as much as their bodies.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

By my estimates, my twelve thousand volunteers would have multiplied by a factor of at least one hundred by the time first symptoms appeared. The biological weapons department would put one and one together quickly, but it would be a day or two before bureaucracy had been bypassed and the report heard at the highest levels, and another day or two until other world leaders were informed through backchannels and a week at least until someone finally admitted the truth openly so concentrated efforts to fight the disease could be started. In that week, another multiplication by ten would have happened, bringing the weapon beyond the threshold where it could still be stopped. With millions all around the world infected, most of whom not yet showing symptoms, no standard test procedure in existence, no vaccination or cure, it would be a race against time. They might even realise too late that I took the entire group of pathogens, not just one. As I said before, the A-279 variants are similar to each other, but different enough that even if someone were to come up with a new cure in such a short time, or removed the errors I introduced into the formula for the old one, it would be effective only in a fraction of patients. More days would be lost understanding that not the cure was ineffective, but the disease more complex than assumed.

The first public news confirmed my assumption. A mystery disease had appeared in Asia. Funny that, only a few of my crowdfunding fools had been in Asia. Maybe they were the most eager, or the most weak. A day later, similar outbreaks had been reported in America and Europe. Two days later, the connection was made. Luck had been on my side, with the strain first discovered in Asia being sufficiently different from the first patients in the west to be initially mistaken for a different disease.

I had added the multiplied pathogens to the prepared food powder - largely bought in bulk from another company in this business - done the final processing and sent the stuff out. We had bypassed all the food regulation agencies and such, stalled the inspectors who had of course come ringing. My collaborators were worried that we would get into trouble, I assured them and the inspectors that of course an inspection would be done before anything was sent out. Two loyal helpers supported me in a two day-and-night marathon to package, label and mail everything. In true startup fashion, we would move first and face consequences later, thumb our noses at the evil government authorities suppressing independent entrepreneurs or some such nonsense.

People had similar ideas before. The Anthrax attacks in 2001, for example. But they sent their packages to high-profile targets that have security in place. My targets were regular folks expecting some chemical substance and believing my lies that everything had been FDA approved and tested by independent laboratories and everything. Timing was crucial - the lies had to be in the public long enough to be believed facts, but not long enough to trigger an official investigation. I was trying to fly under the radar but be big enough for having enough targets. There was a fallback plan, but it was not needed.

In the end, we had almost half a ton of product left over and started sending out small free samples to people who had merely indicated interest. I also made sure to infect my helpers, just for good measure. Everything went well on my side, and the impact and spread worked out just as planned, if not better. No, to be completely honest, I had underestimated A-279.

After sending was mostly complete, I retreated to a mountain cabin that I had rented for a family of four under another false name for three weeks. They would be searching for a single man. A family booking was less suspicious.

There, I enjoyed nature without people, hunted my own meat as I would have to do once civilisation had ended, and followed the news. I enjoyed every moment of it. Things unfolded mostly as I had thought they would. A-279 multiplied faster than its hosts died thanks to its long incubation period. The absence of a reliable test during the first weeks made quarantines difficult if not impossible. Fear and paranoia added to the uncertain situation. Entire countries shut down their airports and borders, only to find out later that the disease was already inside.

It might seem at this point as the work of one man, but I have to extend my gratitude to maybe a hundred or so scientists and military personnel who over the years contributed their part to the research, development, improvement and continued storage of A-279. Humans can always be relied upon to be destructive, petty, irrational and irresponsible.